Chapter Six
Chapter Six
“I’m sorry, Iris. We are supposed to be celebrating your birthday, and you are in my shitter.”
“That’s the vibe of this birthday so far, to be honest.” Iris was standing on a ladder and troubleshooting her neighbor’s antique toilet. She held a small flashlight between her teeth in order to reach both hands into the tank. “ But dish, I can fixsh. ”
The neighbor was Mireille Rapacine, an elder, but not elderly, Frenchwoman whom Iris had come to know on her dog walks.
Madame Rapacine, as Iris called her, was a neighborhood character.
She lived nearby in the first-floor apartment of a stately brownstone on Bank Street and often sat in a lawn chair on her building’s stoop, as if it were a porch in South Philly instead of a twelve-million-dollar townhouse in the coveted West Village.
But she did so with Parisian style: black sunglasses, Hermès scarves, and in the summer, a hand fan—though never, ever a cigarette.
Iris might have found her intimidating, but Hugo adored her; he whined unless Iris let him up the brownstone’s front steps to press his snout into her waiting hands.
During the pandemic, Iris’s first thought was for Mme Rapacine.
She looked in on her every few days during lockdown, brought her groceries, prescriptions, anything that couldn’t be delivered.
But they really became friends when Iris herself caught Covid, or, technically, just after.
Long after her worst symptoms had passed, Iris’s anosmia—loss of smell—persisted.
She could never have anticipated how disorienting and depressing anosmia would be; it didn’t help that this was soon after she and Ben had broken up.
She couldn’t even eat her feelings, as the anosmia had ruined her enjoyment of food—popcorn tasted like Styrofoam, and her beloved Frosted Mini Wheats were wet, wadded tissue paper.
Worse, it made her feel alienated from the world; she felt numb, disconnected, and alone.
Only then did Mme Rapacine reveal that she was a fourth-generation nose, a master perfumer, now retired, and she insisted that Iris come over every afternoon for smell training.
They would sit together before her “organ,” a classical perfumer’s desk whose tiered shelves, reminiscent of the musical instrument, held rows of brown apothecary bottles of various fragrant essences used to “compose” a perfume.
Rapacine would dip thin strips of white paper into different scents for Iris to practice identifying them, instructing her to smell them comme un lapin, like a bunny, with short, rapid sniffs to coax her olfactory receptors into functioning again.
In a month, Iris’s sense of smell and its accompanying pleasures had returned, along with something else: hope.
Madame Rapacine had brought her back to life.
The least Iris could do was repair her toilet.
Rapacine’s powder room was as charming and eccentric as the rest of her apartment.
The close walls were papered in pale blue and forest green toile de Jouy .
The toilet at issue was a bona fide Victorian antique—the type with a wooden seat and wooden tank mounted high on the wall with a brass chain pull.
And before Iris came over, it had been running for a full day and night.
“Normally I give it a tickle and it stops, but this time it is relentless. The super never answers my calls. My new landlord would prefer I drown,” Rapacine snipped.
“Jhuh cha—” Iris removed the flashlight from between her teeth to speak properly, “Sorry—the chain inside gets twisted and the flapper doesn’t close fully.
But don’t worry, it won’t overflow as long as the drain is clear.
” She stepped carefully down the ladder and turned the water valve to open it again.
“And you can always turn this valve to stop the water flowing through the pipes, or in this case, to restart it. Okay, let’s try and flush it now. ”
Rapacine pulled the chain, they held their breath as the flush slowly whirlpooled down, and at last the toilet began to refill normally. Rapacine clapped in delight. “Brava, Iris! Merci, you’re brilliant.”
“Nah, just good at fiddly home mechanics. And they don’t make them like this anymore.
This is the real old New York. Before they did a slapdash reno for every new buyer.
” Iris washed her hands. Upon closer inspection, she noticed that the wallpaper scenes were not pastoral but marine, featuring mermaids waving to ships, pulling sailors and pirates underwater, and communing with sea creatures like giant octopuses and whales. “I’m in love with this wallpaper.”
“ Toile des sirènes . Designed by a friend.”
Iris loved that everything in Rapacine’s apartment had some story or personal connection to her. Iris admired that she lived a full and extraordinary life, with a creative, cultured, and interesting circle of friends. Though Iris hadn’t met any of them.
“You have earned a glass of wine. I have a perfect Sancerre in the frigo . Come.”
—
While Mme Rapacine retrieved the wine, Iris lingered in the living room.
There was a Louis XVI chaise longue upholstered in ochre damask that contrasted beautifully with the peacock blue walls and an Eames armchair in cognac leather, worn as a catcher’s mitt, begging for a rainy afternoon and a book—of which she had plenty.
Her wall space was covered by packed bookshelves and framed art.
The one item of the modern era was the small flatscreen TV tucked on a bar service behind a row of Baccarat barware.
The strange thing was how dark Rapacine kept the apartment.
The windows were covered by double-lined shantung drapes, which she kept drawn, blocking what could be abundant natural light from the bay window.
It pained Iris, both as a lighting designer and an envious apartment dweller.
But Mme Rapacine insisted darkness was absolutely necessary, as sunlight degraded fragrance, and the eye-level tier of every bookshelf displayed volumes of her vast collection of perfume bottles filled with creations from her long career, scents composed by famous noses she counted as friends, vintage perfumes, and other rare fragrances.
Iris had once asked Rapacine why she displayed no personal photographs, and she’d gestured to her perfume library and replied, “These are my photographs.”
It was a small miracle that one of her cats hadn’t knocked any of the bottles off by now, but perhaps even the animals recognized their special value.
Iris pssp-pssp ed and Chéri’s marmalade head popped up in slow-blinking wakefulness from a large wicker basket on the living room floor.
She found them both curled up inside, Chéri, the orange tabby boy, and Jasmine, a deaf white female, still asleep, the two of them forming a Creamsicle yin and yang.
Jasmine felt her brother’s movement, and soon both were yawning and stretching, emerging from the basket like pulled taffy.
Iris crouched to kiss Jasmine’s snowy head and caught a whiff of faintly floral perfume.
“How do even your cats smell good?”
“It is not the cats, but the basket,” Rapacine called back from the kitchen.
Iris bent to sniff the empty basket, and sure enough, the woven wood itself was fragrant: floral, sweet, and a little vegetal.
Rapacine reentered the living room, drying her hands with a towel.
“When I was a girl in Grasse, we lived beside the flower fields, jasmine, mimosa, Rose de Mai. That was one of the pickers’ baskets, it has cradled decades of flower harvests, tens of thousands of freshly plucked jasmine heads. I used to keep my lingerie in it.”
Iris smiled inside.
“But then the white kitten liked it so much, I surrendered it and named her Jasmine.”
“I can’t believe it holds the scent after all this time.”
“My father used to say the only thing that smelled better than the pickers’ baskets were the pickers’ arms—an accord of dewy jasmine mixed with sweat and the musk of warm skin. He would know, he slept with most of them.”
Iris followed Mme Rapacine around a paneled Chinoiserie screen and passed into the kitchen at the back of the apartment, where the sunlight was allowed to bounce off the yellow-painted walls. Rapacine stood at the butcher block island and opened the bottle of wine.
In the light, Iris was struck, as always, that Mireille Rapacine was beautiful.
One might reflexively add “for her age,” which had to be somewhere in her seventies if not eighties, but that would be wrong.
She was beautiful, period. She was petite and slim, but not frail; she had the posture of a dancer.
Iris had never known someone with such deep-set eyes, and although her lashes had grown sparse, the better to admire her piercing blue eyes.
She didn’t make any of the conventional choices for women her age: she left her hair long and gray, shaded like an oyster shell, and she wore it either up in a twist, or, as she did now, loose and wavy, kissing her shoulders.
Rapacine dressed like a cross between Manon des Sources and Steven Tyler, favoring soft peasant blouses and slip dresses and an excess of jewelry, scarves, and the occasional feather.
She rarely hid her freckled décolleté but decorated it with necklaces.
She adorned her slender wrists in gold bangles and stacked rings on every knobby finger.
She didn’t appear to care if her signs of aging were on display.
Instead, she wore her skin so proudly that her age all but disappeared.
“It was your father who taught you to be a nose?” Iris asked.